From the depths

Abstract

If you have ever been infatuated with someone, or want to understand infatuation, there is one work of literature that you should read. It is ‘De Profundis’ (or ‘From the Depths’) by Oscar Wilde.1 Wilde wrote it in Reading Gaol, where he had been imprisoned for his homosexuality. ‘De Profundis’ takes the form of a hundred page letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, known universally as Bosie. Wilde always intended it for publication, although it was over sixty years before an uncensored version appeared in print. In unsparing detail, Wilde recounts the emotional fluctuations of his relationship with Bosie: idealization, adoration, abasement, disappointment, fury, violent arguments, bitterness, disgust and—against all the odds and all the evidence—a recurrent, compulsive return to desire and to hope. It scarcely matters that the lovers here are a distinguished male writer and a stunning aristocratic youth. Wilde's confessions could equally well describe a man's destructive obsession with a woman, or vice versa. Wilde's narrative is lacerating, both of Bosie and of himself. ‘I …